Case Study: Marks and Spencer achieves rapid, cost-effective scaling for major TV and social media campaigns with Microsoft Azure

UK Retailer Uses Cloud Services to Quickly Scale Major TV and Social Media Campaigns

Marks & Spencer, a leading UK retailer with 800 stores and a major e-commerce business, faced a time-critical challenge: launching the Magic & Sparkle holiday microsite in weeks to support a primetime TV and social media campaign that could drive massive, unpredictable traffic spikes without degrading its core shopping site. With December the peak trading month, any slowdown or outage would risk customer trust and sales.

M&S chose Microsoft Azure and worked with Microsoft Services Premier Support to build a cloud-based site, run a proof-of-concept, remove a testing bottleneck (with capacity in an Amsterdam data center and beta load-testing tools), and deploy within a week. The campaign handled the traffic, avoided costly hardware and internal infrastructure work, delivered strong cost and productivity benefits, and proved repeatable—Azure has since been reused for other holiday campaigns and supports M&S’s broader omnichannel goals.

Marks and Spencer

John Pillar

Head of Software Engineering